The previously cloudy future direction of health IT policy has come into sharper focus with two announcements from the Department of Health and Human Services since yesterday.

Thursday, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services gave healthcare providers something they had recently been making a lot of noise about, namely a fighting chance to continue to meet Medicare requirements for "Meaningful Use" of electronic health records in 2015 and beyond. This morning, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology released the long-anticipated first draft of a roadmap for achieving health IT interoperability.

CMS announced that it was intending (bureacrat-speak for "we're going to do it, but don't take it to the bank just yet") to shorten the reporting period for Meaningful Use in 2015, following much outcry and even some proposed congressional legislation about the fact that providers have to demonstrate Meaningful Use for the entire year or face Medicare penalties. Some other changes are under consideration as well.

"Realign hospital EHR reporting periods to the calendar year to allow eligible hospitals more time to incorporate 2014 Edition software into their workflows and to better align with other CMS quality programs.

"Modify other aspects of the program to match long-term goals, reduce complexity, and lessen providers’ reporting burdens.

"Shorten the EHR reporting period in 2015 to 90 days to accommodate these changes."

Currently, hospitals follow the federal fiscal year, which runs Oct. 1-Sept. 30, for the purpose of Meaningful Use, while physicians and other individual providers are tied to the calendar year.

"The new rule, expected this spring, would be intended to be responsive to provider concerns about software implementation, information exchange readiness, and other related concerns in 2015. It would also be intended to propose changes reflective of developments in the industry and progress toward program goals achieved since the program began in 2011," CMS Chief Medical Officer Dr. Patrick Conway wrote on the official CMS blog.

CMS said these changes are separate from the forthcoming meaningful use Stage 3 regulations, which would take effect in 2017; proposed Stage 3 rules are expected by early March. However, it now seems likely that Stage 3 will put hospitals and individual providers on the same timetable.

Meanwhile, ONC's roadmap, which updates the Obama administration's plan to achieve nationwide interoperability of health information, offers a bit of clarity just by the fact that National Coordinator Dr. Karen DeSalvo signed off on it. ONC is saying definitively that DeSalvo is still in charge, despite the fact that she was detailed to the Office of the Secretary at HHS to help with the government's response to last fall's Ebola crisis. Despite reports at the time that she was "leaving" ONC, she has remained in charge of the direction of the office if not day-to-day management.

The roadmap itself calls for better definition of standards, something that has been elusive in health IT to date. Importantly, and not unexpectedly, ONC wants to increase the use of application provider interfaces, much like the rest of the tech world has done since the dawn of the smartphone era.

"One of the guiding principles for the Roadmap is the notion of modularity: complex systems are more durable under changing circumstances when they are divided into independent components that can be connected together," the document states (emphasis in original).

Sure, this 166-page report, dubbed "version 1.0," is a draft, and still leaves plenty of work to be done on actual standards and actual interoperability, but at least we now officially know what the federal government's health IT leaders are thinking. We also know that CMS has heard the criticisms about Meaningful Use and acknowledges that much has to change for American taxpayers to get the value out of their net $27 billion expenditure on EHRs.

That's a good start. Now, it's time to get back to work.

I am a Chicago-based freelance writer. I have been a professional journalist since 1992, focusing on healthcare since 2000. I have been published in numerous trade and general-interest publications in North America and Europe. I am a graduate of Washington University in St. ...